First take: Ramaphosa and his govt is spitting against the Covid-19 ‘bushfire’

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address on Thursday evening confirmed most of what we knew: Government is spitting against what he calls the coronavirus bushfire.

Let’s not beat about the bush: Ramaphosa and his National Coronavirus Command Council have burnt their fingers when it came to previous lockdown levels.

There is simply no more money left in the kitty for hard lockdowns, despite what is happening in European countries.

And, never forget that flare-ups – and a second wave when winter approaches – were always part of the scenario.

Spain has been through this, Britain, Romania, France… even Wuhan.

The Southern Hemisphere is simply behind the curve.

And, hard lockdowns have done way more harm than good.

Test, test, test

As of yesterday, there were around 62 000 people confirmed to have Covid-19 at the moment. Active cases in a population well north of 60 million.

As Donald Trump famously said, mostly correctly: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Government has not released testing data in quite a few days. In addition, the actual number of tests declined over summer and so did the daily infection tallies.

Yes, there have been a significant number of deaths related to Covid-19. However, the actual damage to people in this country stemming from government’s interventions and lockdown regulations has been far worse.

On Sunday, one of the few contrarian voices of reason when it comes to the Covid-19 statistics game spoke out again.

Panda founder and a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, Nick Hudson, said: “The eschewing of pre-Covid-19 science, modelling atrocities, pseudoscientific school closures and mask mandates, testing orgies and service denial that have featured in other countries’ embarrassments were present, but we added local colour.”

Not once has the doomsday scenario sketched by government come true in South Africa. Yet, they continue to make it sound as if the reason for this was due to their interventions.

This is simply not true.

The actual bushfire

If you have taken advantage of the relaxed restrictions to travel around this country, you will see that lockdown limitations have largely been a privilege enjoyed by the suburbs.

In rural areas – even peri-urban areas – you will have to look long and hard to find a mask, let alone social distancing.

This simply means two things.

Firstly, government was never in control of the situation, even with the army beating up people on the streets.

Then, we never had a clear indication of the actual infection rate, let alone the actual death rate or the 92% recovery rate they carry on about.

People have had a crap year. They want to socialise. They want to drink. They want to go on holiday over December.

All of this is going to happen, no matter what.

And government cannot stop them because the economy cannot afford it.

So, infection rates are going to increase no matter what.

This has always been a given.

The actual bushfire on the ground is that most people simply do not care.

You can spit as hard as you want, you will never extinguish this flame of rebellion, not even at “after tears” parties.

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